TidBITS#1083/04-Jul-2011
========================
Issue link:
Lion is coming! But it’s not too early to prepare, with Joe
Kissell’s just-released “Take Control of Upgrading to Lion,” along
with a pre-order discount on Matt Neuburg’s “Take Control of Using
Lion.” Lion’s approach doesn’t mean everyone will stop using Snow
Leopard, and those using 10.6.8 would do well to check out Adam’s
article with solutions to problems with printing and audio, along with
incompatibilities with Parallels Desktop and PGP Desktop. In other
news, Michael Cohen covers the release of the CrashPlan PRO service
for businesses, and Glenn Fleishman clarifies that iTunes Match will
create DRM-free copies of matched tracks. On the feature side, Jeff
Porten reports from the Computers, Freedom, and Privacy 2011
conference about the Arab Spring; Michael Cohen reviews the
Sleeptracker watch; and Rich Mogull paints a picture of the future
where our electronic devices are entirely replaceable. Notable
software releases this week include Thunderbolt Firmware Update and
Java for Mac OS X 10.6 Update 5 / Java for Mac OS X 10.5 Update 10.
Articles
Prepare for Lion with New Take Control Books
CrashPlan PRO Now Available for Businesses
iTunes Match Makes Unlocked Copies
Mac OS X 10.6.8 Suffers Printing and Audio Problems
CFP 2011: Arab Spring or Twitter Revolution?
Sleeptracker: Sleeping with the Night Watch
The Future Is Disposable
TidBITS Watchlist: Notable Software Updates for 4 July 2011
ExtraBITS for 4 July 2011
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Prepare for Lion with New Take Control Books
--------------------------------------------
by Adam C. Engst
article link:
In 2003, we launched the Take Control series with Joe Kissell’s
“Take Control of Upgrading to Panther” and Matt Neuburg’s
“Take Control of Customizing Panther.” Now, nearly 8 years and 4
editions later, we’re hard at work on the fifth editions of these
ebooks, called “Take Control of Upgrading to Lion” and “Take
Control of Using Lion.”
Of course, Lion isn’t out yet — Apple is poised to release it at
some point in July — but Joe and Matt (and Tonya, who is editing
both ebooks) have been burning the midnight oil to help you get
started with Apple’s latest big cat. Still, there’s no reason to
wait for Lion to ship to start preparing for your upgrade, and to
provide you with Joe’s latest expert advice, we now have the first
release of “Take Control of Upgrading to Lion” ready for you to
read, with a free 1.1 update ready to release as soon as Lion ships
and Apple lifts our non-disclosure agreement. For similar reasons,
we can’t release Matt’s “Take Control of Using Lion” until
then, but you can pre-order it now and download it as soon as we can
make it available.
Both books are available independently, but they’re intended to
work together to help you upgrade successfully and then get started
using Lion’s new features, so you can buy them together at a
30-percent discount (you pay $17.50 instead of the $25 list price;
this offer will expire when Apple releases Lion!). Read on for
details.
**Take Control of Upgrading to Lion** -- You can begin upgrading to
Lion now by joining Joe Kissell for the necessary pre-upgrade check
on software and hardware compatibility. You’ll also benefit from
Joe’s expert advice on making the best type of backup in case of
an upgrade disaster and on clearing the decks of useless cruft so
you can start using Lion with plenty of room. In particular,
you’ll learn how to:
* Part with Rosetta: Understand and work around the fact that
PowerPC-based software will not run under Lion, given the absence of
Rosetta.
* Handle your hardware: Thoroughly check your hardware for Lion
compatibility. Also, get ideas for new hardware — it might be time
for more RAM, disk space, or other peripherals, particularly a Magic
Trackpad.
* Deal with duplication: Learn what a disk duplicate is, why having
one is essential before installing Lion, and how to make one easily
and affordably. Also, get help with backing up a Windows volume,
should you be running Windows on your Mac via Boot Camp.
* Verify that all systems are go: Test your Mac to be sure all the
hardware and disks are running properly — better to discover and
correct a problem now than on upgrade day — and find advice on
clearing extra files and software off your disk so that you get a
fresh start with Lion.
* Consider a few geeky details: If you secure your data and documents
with disk encryption now, or would like to under Lion, get advice on
what to do before you upgrade and learn how Lion’s much-improved
FileVault will operate. Also, read about what Joe thinks of
partitioning and what you might want to do about it before
installing.
The 1.0 version of “Take Control of Upgrading to Lion” costs $10
and is currently 66 pages long. As soon as our non-disclosure
agreement with Apple lifts after Lion ships, we plan to release a
free 1.1 update that will cover full installation details, required
post-upgrade tweaks, and troubleshooting tips in case your upgrade
doesn’t go smoothly. It will also tell you how to migrate to a new
Mac running Lion, install Lion Server, and use the new Recovery
mode.
**Take Control of Using Lion** -- In “Take Control of Using
Lion,” Matt Neuburg has revised his essential “Take Control of
Exploring & Customizing Snow Leopard” to look deeply at important
new features in Lion while also discussing older features and
third-party options that may work better for you, all with the goal
of helping you understand Lion’s benefits, learn new habits, and
get back to work quickly after your upgrade. Major topics help you
to:
* Understand Auto Save, so you can let Lion save for you with
confidence.
* Learn how Resume works, and how to disable it when you want a clean
start.
* Figure out how to navigate Lion with the new Mission Control
feature.
* Enter and leave full-screen mode, and switch among full-screen apps
with Mission Control.
* Set up and use Launchpad, and get ideas for additional ways to
launch apps.
* Memorize useful new trackpad and Magic Mouse gestures for
controlling your Mac.
“Take Control of Using Lion” also answers many key questions
about Lion, such as:
* Where did my scrollbars go, and how do I get them back?!?
* How do I make the text in my Finder window sidebar larger?
* Where did my user Library folder go, and how can I access it easily?
* How do I sort items in a Finder window?
* What is this All My Files entry in my sidebar?
* Where have the Appearance and Accounts preference panes gone?
* What is the fun new way of entering accented characters?
* How do I change the size of my mouse pointer icon?
* Is there a way of zooming just a portion of the screen? (Yes!)
This $15 pre-order “ebook” is only one page long; it’s a
placeholder that you can use to get the full “Take Control of
Using Lion” once it’s available. We plan to publish it as soon
as possible after Apple releases Lion and lifts our non-disclosure
agreement. Ideally, this will be the same day Lion becomes
available.
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CrashPlan PRO Now Available for Businesses
------------------------------------------
by Michael E. Cohen
article link:
Code 42 Software has introduced CrashPlan PRO, a new backup software
and service targeted at the SMB market (that’s “small and
medium-sized businesses” for the less acronymically experienced).
Joining CrashPlan+, designed for individual users backing up
personal data from 10 or fewer computers, and CrashPlan PROe,
designed for large enterprises with many hundreds or even thousands
of computers, CrashPlan PRO is designed for businesses and other
organizations running up to 200 computers. (For details about
CrashPlan+, see “CrashPlan+ 3.0 Adds Features, Changes Pricing,”
7 December 2010.)
Like its sibling backup offerings, CrashPlan PRO provides a
cross-platform (Mac/Windows/Linux/Solaris) subscription backup
solution that can make both local and online backups. And, like
CrashPlan+, CrashPlan PRO provides secure, encrypted backups to
cloud-based servers and offers individual users restore capabilities
from almost any location that has Internet access. However, unlike
CrashPlan+, CrashPlan PRO enables administrators with relatively
little IT experience to assign users and computers to a backup plan,
monitor backup progress and statistics, and use a Web-based
dashboard to manage an organization’s backups.
The cost of CrashPlan PRO varies depending on the number of
computers being backed up and the amount of backup storage
allocated. Businesses can choose between a plan that offers
unlimited backups for a specific number of computers, or plans that
share a specific backup storage allocation among an unlimited number
of computers. To help customers figure out the best deal for their
needs, CrashPlan offers a simple online tool that helps potential
customers figure out the best available plans for a given business
installation.
CrashPlan PRO is available in the United States and Canada now, with
worldwide availability expected by the end of this year. A 30-day
free trial is also available.
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iTunes Match Makes Unlocked Copies
----------------------------------
by Glenn Fleishman
article link:
11 comments
Apple suffered from ambiguity and false starts lately, such as
announcing the end of MobileMe nearly two weeks before having a
document ready to explain the nuance (see “Apple Details
Transition from MobileMe to iCloud,” 24 June 2011), and shipping
Final Cut Pro X days before it had the answers published to obvious
questions from professional customers.
The same is true with iTunes Match, a new subscription service that
will be part of iTunes in the Cloud (see “iCloud Rolls In,
Extended Forecast Calls for Disruption,” 6 June 2011). With iTunes
Match, Apple said, you’ll be able to pay $25 a year to sync all
the music you didn’t purchase from the iTunes Store through iCloud
to your various computers and iOS devices. Instead of uploading 100
percent of your own music, however, Apple would use a variety of
metadata and audio-matching algorithms to check whether a song you
owned was the same as one in its 18-million item catalog.
What will happen after the match occurs has been rather confusing,
and Apple has provided mixed guidance. On its Web site promoting
iCloud, Apple continues to state:
All you have to upload is what iTunes can’t match. Which
is much faster than starting from scratch. And all the music
iTunes matches plays back at 256-Kbps iTunes Plus quality —
even if your original copy was of lower quality
We wondered if Apple was applying digital rights management (DRM)
encryption to matched files. Otherwise, what would stop someone from
paying $25 for one year, matching all their songs, and walking away
with higher quality files forever? This information has been
available, though, in a place I should have looked: a press release
that came out on 6 June 2011 but which I just found out about after
Apple changed links to existing releases on the press relations
portion of its Web site.
In the press release, Apple makes crystal clear what’s going to
happen, something that was missed by many, thanks to the vast amount
of news that came out that day. The relevant sentence:
In addition, music not purchased from iTunes can gain the
same benefits by using iTunes Match, a service that replaces
your music with a 256 kbps AAC DRM-free version if we can
match it to the over 18 million songs in the iTunes Store, it
makes the matched music available in minutes (instead of weeks
to upload your entire music library), and uploads only the
small percentage of unmatched music.
There you have it. You’ll be able to upgrade all your ripped files
that aren’t up to snuff — avoiding replacing, say, your lossless
FLAC versions — with the best Apple and the labels have to offer,
for what is essentially a one-time $25 fee. This is the right way to
do it, and it’s an awfully nice gift for those of us, like yours
truly, who ripped their CDs at lower quality many years ago.
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Mac OS X 10.6.8 Suffers Printing and Audio Problems
---------------------------------------------------
by Adam C. Engst
article link:
11 comments
It almost seems that Apple is focusing so much attention on the
upcoming release of Mac OS X Lion that testing of the last few Mac
OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard releases hasn’t been up to the company’s
usual quality. 10.6.7 suffered from font problems that had design
professionals up in arms (see “Apple Releases Snow Leopard Font
Update,” 26 April 2011), and now the just-released 10.6.8 is
taking its share of lumps, with a variety of user-reported problems
surrounding printing, audio, hyperactive Dock CPU usage, boot
problems for PGP Desktop users, and more (see “Mac OS X 10.6.8
Update Preps for Lion,” 24 June 2011).
**Printing Problems** -- Most notable among the 10.6.8-related
problems are those surrounding printing, with the print queue
continually pausing and “backend” errors like the line below
appearing in the system.log viewable in Console.
printer-state-message="/usr/libexec/cups/backend/lpd failed"
Although many potential solutions were suggested in the Apple
Discussions forum thread, ranging from repairing permissions to
resetting the printing system (Control-click a printer in the Print
& Fax preference pane and choose Reset Printing System), the most
effective solution has been an AppleScript-based application called
Repair10.6.8. It basically copies old versions of four Unix apps —
dnssd, ipp, lpd, and socket — over the new versions installed by
10.6.8. I haven’t experienced the problem, so I can’t comment
personally on how well it works, but a number of people in the forum
thread have had good luck with it.
**Audio Problems** -- There are a number of complaints in the Apple
Discussions forum about audio problems of various sorts. While the
details of the problems vary, the solution seems to be the same in
all cases: replace the AppleHDA.kext kernel extension (version
2.0.5, if my Mac is any indication) installed by 10.6.8 with the
version from 10.6.7 (version 1.9.9, even though it has the same
creation date as the later version). Time Machine is the easiest way
to get the AppleHDA.kext file back; it’s located in
/System/Library/Extensions.
**Parallels / Dock Incompatibility** -- Many users of Parallels
Desktop are reporting that after updating to Mac OS X 10.6.8, the
Dock process starts taking 100 percent of the CPU, causing
significant performance problems. The issue is related to the option
in Parallels Desktop that makes Windows applications appear in the
Dock (specifically, it’s related to icons larger than 128 by 128
pixels). There’s an update to Parallels Desktop 6.0.12092 that
solves the problem, or you can set each virtual machine in Parallels
Desktop not to show Windows applications in the Dock.
**Boot Problems with PGP Desktop** -- Users of versions of PGP Desktop
before 10.1.2 found that their Macs wouldn’t boot after installing
10.6.8, since Apple’s Software Update utility overwrites a
critical boot file related to whole disk encryption during
installation. PGP recommends upgrading to at least version 10.1.2
before installing Mac OS X 10.6.8, but if that train has already
left the station, you can follow a few quick steps to replace the
boot.efi file with the necessary pgpboot.efi file. If that doesn’t
work, you’ll need to make a PGP Whole Disk Encryption Recovery CD
and use it to upgrade or even decrypt your disk.
**Other Problems** -- Although I’ve seen other complaints, including
slow boot times and strange color issues, most are merely anecdotal
(which doesn’t mean they’re not real, just that they don’t
seem to affect many people). Nevertheless, the standard fix for
inexplicable problems that crop up after a Mac OS X upgrade is to
download and install the combo updater.
The Mac OS X 10.6.8 Update Combo contains all the changes since
10.6.0, and is a 1.09 GB download. You can install it directly over
an unhappy installation of 10.6.8, or if all else fails, you can
reinstall Snow Leopard from an appropriate Install DVD (the one that
came with your Mac, if that’s newer than 10.6.0) and then use the
combo updater to move up to 10.6.8.
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CFP 2011: Arab Spring or Twitter Revolution?
--------------------------------------------
by Jeff Porten
article link:
A panel discussion at the Computers, Freedom, and Privacy 2011
conference on the role of online media in the Arab Spring
revolutions ironically opened one person short: a slated speaker
working for democratic freedoms in Bahrain was unable to attend,
thanks to delays in her receiving a U.S. visa for the conference.
The four speakers in attendance, however, provided an excellent
discussion on how the Internet is used and misused in the Middle
East.
Deborah Hurley provided the background on Tunisia prior to the
recent fall of Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, President of Tunisia from
1987 through last January (although his title should perhaps be in
ironic quotes). Hurley was a member of a delegation from the United
Nations World Summit on Information Society, reviewing the role of
IT in human rights in Tunisia, and found that country, in her words,
to be one of the most repressive places on Earth. Despite this,
Tunisia was largely unknown in the United States, and was seen in
Europe primarily as a venue for a cheap beach vacation.
Tunisia enjoys one of the highest levels of literacy in the Arab
world, and, because of policies of the first post-colonial
government, has much higher rates of women’s education and entry
into the workforce than is common elsewhere in the Middle East. This
provided a double-edged sword: on the one hand, it paved the way for
high penetration of information technology through the populace, but
it also gave the government unfettered ability to control and
monitor communications. The state was entirely in control of who
received college placement and job openings, based largely on their
public and private agreements with the government. But as Tunisia
was a U.S. ally, the United States and other Western governments
overlooked such issues.
Hurley was followed by Moez Chakchouk, the new CEO of the Tunisian
Internet Agency, or ITI. This was a bit of a surprise in itself, as
the ITI was a primary force behind state repression under Ben Ali.
Chakchouk opened his talk by saying that under the prior regime, he
would have been unable to attend the conference as either a Tunisian
citizen or as a government representative; the very topic of the
conference, and the idea that there might be human rights issues at
stake, were forbidden topics of discussion.
Under the old ITI, a 404 error — known to the rest of the world as
the Web’s “file not found” alert — was more likely to be a
message from the Tunisian government about the content of the site.
The ITI was the sole source of information technology inside
Tunisia, and had complete control over installation and monitoring;
if you were on the Internet in the old Tunisia, you were doing so on
the government’s terms. Chakchouk’s role is now to implement new
technology without the constant threat of surveillance.
Jillian York from the Electronic Frontier Foundation expanded the
discussion to Egypt and the rest of the Middle East. The other
countries experiencing Arab Spring unrest have seen two failed
models: Tunisia tried to clamp down control, then turned off its
monitoring as a last attempt at mollification only one day before
Ben Ali was forced to abdicate. Egypt simply shut down the Internet,
but was then forced to turn it back on after this action literally
sent people into the streets.
So the other nations experiencing uprisings seem to have decided
that instead of these tactics, they’ll simply arrest anyone saying
disagreeable things online. Video sharing sites have largely been
shut down; this is what caused many people to turn to Facebook.
It’s not that Facebook itself is the de facto platform of choice;
it’s more that when it remains accessible, it becomes a
destination.
York believes that there are core issues that can generate domestic
upheavals from a previously apolitical population: one of these is
government censorship, another is the use of torture against those
who have been detained for anti-government activities. But the
examples of Egypt and Tunisia, two countries with high technology
usage, do not apply directly to other nations. In Libya, only 5
percent of the population was online before the Qaddafi government
shut the Internet off entirely. In Syria, this number is 20 percent,
but as the government is arresting people and demanding their
passwords, it is sometimes difficult to tell whether what you’re
hearing are words of the dissident, or planted words from the
government.
Panelist Nasser Weddady, from the American Islamic Congress,
strongly blamed both the complicity of Western governments and the
mass media for allowing such abuses to continue. His work is to help
bridge these online movements into real-world results by connecting
grassroots democratic movements with known methods of working with
international media and civil society groups. There is a presumption
among the local activists that the mass media will not be a source
of help; instead, traditional media are likely to ignore activists
until they reach a large number on their own. The bigger story is
that, as of this year, the world’s media is beginning to see
social networks as a valuable source of information. But even when
this does not occur, individuals with large Twitter or Facebook
networks can sometimes leverage their networks as a protection
against arrest or being otherwise silenced by the government.
Organizing efforts at the grassroots level used to be directed at
other citizens in the nation; now the new targets can include
producers in the worldwide traditional media, and their audiences,
in order to bring international pressure to bear on repressive
governments. Weddady called this “weaponizing hashtags.” York
followed up by saying that American companies, including Websense,
Cisco, and Narus, are building the technologies that governments use
to repress their populations, so perhaps we should ask why companies
openly subverting American ideals are getting a pass in the public
debate.
Weddady specifically mentioned that at one point, he joked with his
colleagues that if one more reporter called him to ask about the
“Twitter revolution,” he would commit suicide, as this proved
how much the mass media was missing the real story of the Arab
Spring and inserting their own narrative. The details of the
revolution differ widely from nation to nation, and both the
traditional media reports and social networking information coming
from these regions needs to be understood in their national and
regional contexts.
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Sleeptracker: Sleeping with the Night Watch
-------------------------------------------
by Michael E. Cohen
article link:
It has been a long time since I slept like a baby (neither waking at
3 AM, crying and needing to be changed, nor slumbering peacefully
and soundly), so when I had a chance to try out the Sleeptracker
Elite sleep phase monitor alarm watch, I was intrigued. The device
promised to help me monitor and improve both my sleeping habits and
the quality of my sleep. That various versions of the watch have
been in production since at least 2005 I found reassuring: in trying
it out, I wasn’t about to subject my precious sleeping hours to
some untested new technology. In fact, Andrew Laurence first wrote
about Sleeptracker in TidBITS nearly six years ago in
“Sleeptracker: How Dick Tracy Goes to Sleep” (11 July 2005).
**Core Idea** -- The Sleeptracker is a wristwatch that watches you
sleep. It contains accelerometers that monitor your movements during
your slumbers and records the periods when you are the most restless
(the manual that comes with the watch calls these periods the
“lighter stages of sleep”).
Every morning when you wake (or any time during the day, really) you
can use the watch’s buttons and display to review the previous
night’s record of light sleep periods and see how you slept. More
useful, though, is its capability for building a long-term profile
of your sleeping patterns: You can transfer the Sleeptracker’s
sleep pattern data to your Mac with the product’s downloadable Mac
software and the included USB connector clamp and cable (more about
the cable and the software below) and maintain a long-term annotated
record of your experiences in the embrace of Morpheus.
The Sleeptracker’s alarm clock feature leverages the watch’s
accelerometers to decide when to wake you: Rather than wake you
exactly at your specified time, the Sleeptracker employs an alarm
window (20 minutes by default, though this is adjustable) and
triggers its alarm (audible, vibration, or both) at the lightest
detected sleep phase within that window. Supposedly, being wakened
when you are already almost awake makes you less groggy and more
ready to meet the challenges of the day.
**Sleeping with the Technology** -- The watch that I received was the
men’s model Sleeptracker Elite, a large, rather clunky watch with
an integrated rubberized buckle-type strap. It looks like something
you’d wear when exercising, not sleeping.
The manual is reasonably clear in its explanations of how to set the
watch via the four buttons on its sides. However, although the
manual _does_ tell you how to shut off the watch’s alarm, it
doesn’t conspicuously call out this important bit of information,
so the first morning I spent a few minutes sleepily stabbing at
buttons to shut the thing off while paging blearily through the
manual to find the correct button to press.
The watch’s display itself uses large, clear characters and would
be readable by someone with mild farsightedness; given that you
probably don’t wear reading glasses when you sleep (I certainly
don’t), the big display is a plus when you wake up at night and
want to check the watch.
And wake up I did — quite a lot — the first night I wore the
Sleeptracker. I experienced a sort of somnolent stage fright: I
found it hard to fall asleep and stay asleep while wearing the lumpy
metal and plastic device and, when I wasn’t wakeful, I was
dreaming about wearing it. The next few nights, however, I slept
better.
As far as recording my wakeful periods goes, the watch seemed to do
it properly each of the four nights I wore it. I found that viewing
my sleep record right on the watch each morning was easy enough to
do with the watch button interface, and the averaged deep-sleep
summary at the end of the night’s record was instructive.
However, on two of the four mornings the alarm failed to trigger at
all. In one case, I almost missed a morning appointment because of
it. The two days when the alarm did go off (within the window, as
advertised), I wasn’t noticeably aware of being more or less
groggy than usual.
I had planned to try using the Sleeptracker for at least a week, but
I cut my experiments short when I began to develop a slight rash
where the watch’s back touched my skin. Since I don’t normally
sleep while wearing plastic and metal objects, I don’t know
whether I am abnormally sensitive to the materials that compose this
particular watch and strap, or if any watch might produce the same
effect on me.
**Using the Software and Cable** -- Sleeptracker has had a Windows
version of its sleep database software for a while, but has only
just introduced the Mac version. No software for either platform is
included in the package, but either is a quick download from the
company’s support page.
The Mac version of the software is minimalist. It does let you
record, either manually or via import, your daily sleep records, and
you can make notes about each night’s sleep. You can also include
“sleep factor” information: sleep factors come in the form of
questions, such as “Did you play video games within 1 hour of
going to bed last night?” However, though daily answers to the
sleep factor questions can be associated with each sleep record, the
program provides no analytical tools for using them. You can easily
export your sleep records, too, as CSV (comma-separated-value) text
files, which you can readily import into Numbers or Excel.
The most frustrating part of the software experience is when you
attempt to transfer your latest sleep record information from the
watch to the Mac. The watch has no mini-USB port on it; instead, it
has a row of three contacts on its back. You use them with the
provided USB cable.
The USB cable has a normal USB plug on one end, and an alligator
clip with three teeth on the other. These teeth are designed to line
up with the metal contacts on the back of the watch when you clamp
the clip to the watch. However, lining them up is tricky and takes a
little practice.
That wouldn’t be a huge problem, except that the software looks
for a watch-USB connection only when it launches. Therefore, to
offload the data you have to clamp the watch, then launch the
software. If you haven’t lined up the pins properly, you must quit
the software, retry the clamping, and then relaunch. This is not
something you want to go through before your first cup of coffee.
I experienced one other minor glitch with the software: It
consistently labeled each day’s record with a date that was off by
one, so that, for example, my sleep record for the night of May
31-June 1 was labeled as June 2.
**Conclusions** -- The Sleeptracker strikes me as a good idea
indifferently executed. A slimmer, lighter, more comfortable watch
would be a good start on improving the experience. So would better,
more forgiving software. Most importantly, a much better method of
offloading the watch’s data is needed: the alligator clamp cable
is really a clunky kludge, and not what one expects from a watch
that costs $179.
Much as I wanted to like the Sleeptracker, it seems that I’ll have
to find a different set of needles to knit my ravel’d sleeve of
care.
----
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The Future Is Disposable
------------------------
by Rich Mogull
article link:
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When personal computers first started their mass migration into our
homes we didn’t worry about corrupted hard drives or losing system
configurations. Our digital lives were carried in boxes of floppies,
and weren’t locked down in a single vault deep in the bowels of
our computer, doomed to inevitable failure. Backups were as simple
as copying a floppy, and any computer you booted looked and worked
exactly like every other computer at home or the office, assuming it
was made by the same company.
It was only with the advent of the hard drive that the box on your
desk became a black hole for your content. Slowly, like the
proverbial frog in the frying pan, we filled those drives with more
data and settings than we could store on portable media.
First we became tied to our settings and applications. Rather than
loading our word processor or new game off a disk on whatever system
was handy, we _installed_ it and permanently burned it the into the
soul of the system. For a short time we could technically (and
legally) install the application wherever we needed it, but
eventually software licenses and digital rights management forced us
to choose, at birth, where each application would live for its
lifetime.
At the same time we started tweaking and personalizing our systems.
“To improve workflow” we told ourselves, but since every
computer now looked and acted slightly differently, it became that
much harder to use anyone else’s Mac.
For a time we were at least able to keep our documents with us
wherever we went. We moved from floppy disks to SyQuest cartridges
and Zip disks, and then on to CD-Rs before ending up with USB drives
in our quest to always have access to our information. Each
successive technology became physically smaller and virtually more
capacious. All were clunky but functional, although they were also a
reliability and security nightmare, since it was all too easy for a
disk to be damaged, lost, or stolen.
And then we generated and accumulated more data than could be copied
to any reasonable portable storage device. That’s when it
effectively became impossible to keep all our information —
wherever it was stored, since we still needed access to it in
multiple locations — current, synchronized, and complete.
To give ourselves credit, we did recognize these issues fairly early
on. Businesses tried to get users to work from shared network
drives. Microsoft came up with roaming profiles and other tools to
let workers bounce between computers, but you were as likely to
corrupt all your email as to get Outlook to launch on another
workstation.
And thus we have created a world where we’re all on an endless
quest to manage our systems and data. A world where we buy special
cables to migrate to a new computer. A world where the loss of a
laptop will cripple our ability to work. Where we spend countless
hours backing up our backups, migrating our files via email, and
pretending our laptops are desktops just so we have a little
portability.
But that world is coming to an end. In the future our digital lives
won’t be defined by and centered on our devices, but on our bits
and bytes. Everything from our data to our applications will be
portable, accessible, and persistent. Our devices, including our
computers, will become instantly replaceable, even disposable. Their
value becomes nothing more than the cost of the hardware, and we
will never fear physical loss or failure.
**The Future Is Here, but Unevenly Distributed** –– I started
writing this article on my iPad at a local coffee shop. When I ran
out of coffee I closed my smart cover and walked out the door, drove
home, and picked up where I left off on my computer. I never once
chose a Save command, dialed into a network, or pressed a Sync
button. After every few words my app used just a smidgen of my 3G
bandwidth and updated the article on a cloud server. Once home, I
launched the Mac version of the application and picked up right
where I dropped off. In about 15 minutes I need to head off for
another appointment, and while I’m in the waiting room I’ll
continue writing, albeit at a slower pace, on my iPhone.
It’s hard to overstate the disruptive impact of the simultaneous
adoption of cloud and mobile computing, combined with ever-improving
network access. All at once, we are gaining the ability to access
nearly all of our information and services, nearly anywhere we want.
As much as we like to complain about network access, I’ve used my
iPhone to navigate the streets of Moscow, my iPad to phone home from
China, and my MacBook Air to video chat with my children from hotel
rooms around the world. I can’t remember the last time I
couldn’t access a file I needed, even if I had only my iPhone with
me.
Late last year I was sitting in a hotel room in Kiev when a text
message popped up on my phone, warning me of a canceled flight. The
message was from TripIt, a travel service that tracks all my
itineraries and alerts me of any changes. Within a few minutes, I
had investigated alternate options to get home despite massive
weather smashing a good chunk of the United States, called my
airline using Skype, and secured a workable alternative itinerary.
On the long trip home I met other travelers stuck in airports,
waiting for flights, who realized their journey was in trouble only
when they arrived for check-in.
But we are only skating on the earliest edges of this transition.
Not all devices offer the same capabilities, and the cloud services
backing them are a mishmash of varying feature sets and reliability.
While the technology elite can configure and leverage nearly
whatever they need, and regular users can access bits and pieces, it
is often a laborious and confusing process to make things work the
way you want. Even editing a standard office document on your iPad
and sharing it with a coworker can involve a labyrinthine workflow
spanning multiple applications and services.
It also isn’t necessarily cheap. I’m fortunate that my work pays
for all the devices and network connectivity I need (an advantage of
owning the company). I maintain wireless access on both AT&T and
Verizon, and I have the resources to pay for expensive overseas
access, a variety of services and applications, and the latest
devices. Fortunately, history tells us that what’s difficult and
expensive today will be common and cheap tomorrow, if the demand is
there.
As Apple, Google, Microsoft, and others bake the cloud into our
devices, operating systems, and applications, these sorts of
scenarios will become the dominant way of using our technology, not
an exception we need to self-configure and manage.
**Tools Are Disposable** –– One of the most fascinating aspects of
this transition is a return to the days where our devices don’t
matter. As not only our data, but our applications and settings
migrate and synchronize across the cloud, we are no longer tied to
the anchors sitting on our desks or carried in our bags. While we
aren’t fully there yet, we’re close to being able to move from
device to device and maintain the functionality and familiarity we
need.
I used to be one of those people who relied on a big MacBook Pro
instead of a desktop. Keeping files synchronized across more than
one system was painful, and it was easier to limit my functionality
than struggle to keep everything coordinated. Then, about two years
ago, thanks to Dropbox, I was able to keep at least my important
work files in sync across systems. I took the plunge and bought a
big Mac Pro for my heavy day-to-day work, along with a smaller
MacBook for traveling.
IMAP kept my email available on all my devices, MobileMe my calendar
and contacts, 1Password my logins, and Dropbox my files. I didn’t
always have all the apps I needed, or things like music and photos,
but from a work standpoint I could get my job done on the road.
A few months ago I decided to downsize once again and bought a
MacBook Air to complement my iPad. That was the moment I realized
how close we are to truly disposable computing.
Setting up the new system took a fraction of the time my migrations
used to. Apple’s Migration Assistant effectively mirrored my older
MacBook, pulling across all my applications, files, and settings. I
also used it to synchronize my older MacBook Pro, which I still need
on some trips that require beefier processing. In a short afternoon
I ended up with three laptops with nearly identical configurations.
All of these laptops are encrypted, and data constantly
synchronized. Before taking a trip, all I need to do is boot the one
I need and let everything sync across the network. For trips where I
don’t want a laptop, I have my iPhone and iPad, both of which also
share access to all my files and services.
Instead of carrying my old box of floppies, I just pick the tool I
need for the job, and have access to all I require wherever I am.
Since each device is encrypted, if one is lost or stolen, I’m out
only the cost of the hardware. (And while that’s non-trivial,
I’ve already acknowledged that this lifestyle isn’t yet cheap.)
Everything on all my systems is also backed up to the cloud — I
could literally lose every single device at the same time without
losing any important data.
In short, all my devices are disposable. I can replace any one —
from my iPhone to my Mac Pro — at any time with minimal
inconvenience. Yes, restoring many gigabytes of pictures or video
isn’t an instant process, especially if I lose local backups, but
just a few years ago losing _all_ of my data was a very real
possibility. What makes them disposable isn’t merely the
persistence of information, but the consistency of data in
conjunction with applications and settings. That’s what gives me
the ability to pick up whichever one I want as I walk out the door
and still have access to whatever I need.
[Editor’s Note: This vision is almost exactly what Google has
touted as the guiding force behind their Chromebook and Chrome OS.
In that case, there is no local data at all; everything is stored in
the cloud, since the face of the Chrome OS literally is a Web
browser. But as a result, you can sign into any Chromebook — or
use a Web browser on any computer — and have access to exactly the
same data, applications, and settings. Obviously, there are some
tradeoffs to living entirely in a Web browser, but you gain complete
freedom from any particular device. -Adam]
**Tomorrow Is Almost Here** –– While my devices are disposable,
maintaining this setup still requires a lot of manual effort. Not
all of my software is licensed for multiple systems, I have to
update everything manually, and configurations drift over time as I
make changes on one system or another.
I don’t lose data, but I still need to be careful about what I
save where and about keeping my applications up to date. It’s easy
for a geek like me, but it’s a far cry from popping the right
floppy into whatever hardware is handy and getting to work. The good
news is we get closer to my idealistic scenario every year.
This is why iCloud and the Mac App Store are so interesting. Apple
is creating the early pieces we need to move past the current
limitations. With the Mac App Store we need only a username and
password to pull down the latest versions of our apps on whatever
system we need. Instead of having to manage updates manually like I
do now, I only have to launch App Store, look for updates, and
install them all at once. At long last, Apple has essentially opened
Software Update up to other developers.
Apple is making this even easier in iOS by backing up your settings
to iCloud. Instead of relying on the Migration Assistant, we’ll
only have to enter our account credentials and wait while the device
downloads all our settings from the master copy in the cloud.
To write this article I used Simplenote, a cloud service for writing
with iOS apps along with a Web interface I run as a dedicated app on
my Mac (thanks to the site-specific browser Fluid). I never have to
save, since my words are synced instantly to the cloud and then to
my devices. iCloud, Lion, and iOS 5 could bring this functionality
to _all_ our applications. Rather than saving files in directories
as I do now with Dropbox, applications could save and load data
automatically, silently, in the background. Start on one device,
edit, and continue on another without ever thinking about it. Make a
mistake? Just go back and pull up an older version that was kept for
you.
Many vendors offer tools to host files and backups in the cloud, but
Apple is taking iCloud in a totally different direction. Within
Apple’s ecosystem the cloud becomes the center of everything —
your apps, your data, and your settings. It won’t be done by file
synchronization that extends our current model of computing, but by
baking the concept of cloud access into everything we do at a
fundamental level. Our devices finally become tools, not roach
motels where the bits check in, but never check out.
If Apple pulls this off it will be one of the most ambitious leaps
in the history of consumer technology. Just as the Mac changed
desktop computing, the iPod changed the way we listen to music, and
the iPhone transformed the mobile phone into something from science
fiction, the overlap of iCloud, Lion, and iOS could change
everything we know about personal computing.
----
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TidBITS Watchlist: Notable Software Updates for 4 July 2011
-----------------------------------------------------------
by TidBITS Staff
article link:
**Thunderbolt Firmware Update** -- Even though there still aren’t
any mainstream Thunderbolt peripherals, owners of
Thunderbolt-equipped Macs should probably install the Thunderbolt
Firmware Update to be ready. All Apple is saying is that it
“provides Thunderbolt performance and stability fixes,” but
given how new Thunderbolt is, it seems likely that Apple would still
be squashing bugs. Since this is a firmware update, be sure not to
interrupt the update process that starts after your Mac restarts.
(Free, 486 KB)
Read/post comments about Thunderbolt Firmware Update.
**Java for Mac OS X 10.6 Update 5 / Java for Mac OS X 10.5 Update 10**
-- Apple has released Java for Mac OS X 10.6 Update 5 and Java for
Mac OS X 10.5 Update 10, which the company says “provide improved
reliability, security, and compatibility” by updating Java SE 6 to
1.6.0-26. (On Macs running Mac OS X 10.5 that aren’t 64-bit
capable, Java is updated to 1.5.0-30.) As far as we can tell, the
changes are mostly fixes for security vulnerabilities. Apple
suggests that you quit any Web browsers and Java applications before
installing the update, though it’s probably easier to restart
immediately after installation if you’re running the largely
invisible Java-based CrashPlan backup software (which is the main
Java app we use). The updates require either Mac OS X 10.6.6 or
later, or 10.5.8. (Free, 75.45 MB / 120.33 MB)
Read/post comments about Java for Mac OS X 10.6 Update 5 / Java for
Mac OS X 10.5 Update 10.
ExtraBITS for 4 July 2011
-------------------------
by TidBITS Staff
article link:
Enjoying live summer music doesn’t mean you have to worry about
parking or crowds, with the iTunes Music Festival streaming live
during July. Also this week, we have links to details about
Thunderbolt cables and answers from Apple about Final Cut Pro X,
along with notice that those in Chicago can come listen to Adam talk
about Lion and iCloud on 6 July 2011.
**iTunes Music Festival Streaming Live This Month** -- Sixty-one
artists are performing at the iTunes Music Festival in London
through the rest of July, and Apple is streaming those performances
live all month. You can watch the performances either in the iTunes
Store via iTunes on your computer, or via the free iTunes Festival
London 2011 app, which is designed for iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad.
If you watch it on an iOS device, you can use AirPlay to stream it
to an Apple TV 2 to see it on the big screen.
Read/post comments
**Initial Thunderbolt Cables to Cost $49 from Apple** -- Thunderbolt
has been largely theoretical so far, but with the first peripherals
lining up for release in the near future, this Ars Technica article
is a particularly interesting read. It claims that, at least at
first, Thunderbolt peripherals won’t ship with the necessary
cables, and users will have to buy Thunderbolt cables from Apple for
$49 for a 2 meter cable. At some point, other manufacturers will
undoubtedly start manufacturing Thunderbolt cables, which will
likely drive the price down, but it’s unclear how long that will
take.
Read/post comments
**Join Adam Engst on July 6th at the Chicago Apple User Group** -- If
you’re near Chicago on 6 July 2011, come to the Chicago Apple User
Group, where TidBITS publisher Adam Engst will be speaking about
Lion and iCloud, and taking any and all questions from the audience.
Read/post comments
**Apple Answers Final Cut Pro X Questions** -- Apple has responded to
concerns about Final Cut Pro X, the rewritten version of Final Cut
Pro that lacks several professional features found in Final Cut Pro
7. Most of the answers can be summed up as, “Not yet, but it
will” concerning multi-camera editing, assigning audio tracks,
support for some video formats (like RED), and export to XML, OMF,
AAF, and EDLs. Apple also notes that plug-in developers need to
update their wares to be 64-bit compatible before they will work
within Final Cut, and that volume license purchasing will be
available soon.
Read/post comments
$$
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